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The Dissonance Of Innovation

Dr Stuart Woolley
CodeX
Published in
4 min readDec 23, 2024

When you’re scolded for innovating, but congratulated on the result.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

If you’ve been in the Grand Game of Software Engineering for any reasonable amount of time then you’ve most likely come across the situation where you see a great solution to a problem, something that will very definitely be a much needed product / product enhancement, but are absolutely prevented from doing anything about it because a customer isn’t paying for it.

Even though you may be between projects, you might have some spare hours whether you’re being whored, sorry, billed out to a customer or not, or that it’s some holiday or other and no-one’s doing anything — management bring the hammer down and say “no”.

It’s almost as if they deliberately prevent the technicals from doing anything innovative, productive, or even efficient during such times…

It’s one of the most frustrating things about working in the Grand Game, right up there with having to delete every PowerPoint a manager habitually sends you or having to book holidays that seem to always coincide with mandatory fun events based in the office.

That slack time (no relation) could be used productively on enhancing existing products, for example, but the kibosh is put on that one under the guise of “don’t give the customer something they’re not paying for”.

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CodeX
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Published in CodeX

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Dr Stuart Woolley
Dr Stuart Woolley

Written by Dr Stuart Woolley

Worries about the future. Way too involved with software. Likes coffee, maths, and . Would prefer to be in academia. SpaceX, X, and Overwatch fan.

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